Emma Malaya

Cinema: A Public Affair

A cineastic journey into the world of Naum Kleiman, one of the most important intellectuals in Russia today. Naum Kleiman, an internationally acclaimed Eisenstein specialist, is the director of the „Musey Kino“, Moscow’s museum of cinema. Since 1989, the „Musey Kino“, has shown previously banned classics of world cinema and Soviet films. Many saw the „Musey Kino“, as Moscow ́s most important intellectual forum. In 2005, the Moscow municipality sold the „Musey Kino’s“ building and it became homeless. In October 2014, the Russian Minister of Culture fired Naum Kleiman as director. In protest, his entire team handed in their resignations. Scenes from iconic movies and interviews with Muscovites of different ages and social backgrounds form a documentary film collage which mirrors Russian reality today.

The Village Teacher

A life-long story of a romantic school teacher who left imperial St. Petersburg for teaching country children. Driven by noble intentions to enlighten people and examples by 1880s revolutionary "People's Will" member teachers, a young woman spent her life in a village and evidenced the changes a Russian village has undergone from pre-revolutionary tsarist times to late 1940s.

Rainbow

The German conquerors are above nothing, not even the slaughter of small children, to break the spirit of their Soviet captives. Suffering more than most is Olga, a Soviet partisan who returns to the village to bear her child, only to endure the cruelest of arbitrary tortures at the hands of the Nazis. Eventually, the villagers rise up against their oppressors-but unexpectedly do not wipe them out, choosing instead to force the surviving Nazis to stand trial for their atrocities in a postwar "people's court." (It is also implied that those who collaborated with the Germans will be dealt with in the same evenhanded fashion).